Lilium is a post-digital cine-symphonic mural that re-imagines urban regeneration by drawing citizens into a laneway transformed into a spatial soundscape and a cinematic mural that depicts a supernatural world inhabited by playful and energetic hybrid species. Overlooked cycles of life and death are expressed through disparate temporalities – generative sound and photographic compositions of human figures and decaying flora emerge, bloom, procreate, decay, and re-incarnate.

Lilium offers an aesthetic reflection on the nature of decay and architecture of the city to prompt the questioning of natural life cycles. A dialogic exchange between citizens, place, space and events is fused into an experience of the mind to open a possibility for existence through ourselves and our changed perceptions of being that might free the imagination from the city's functional and technical limitations. The existential image and soundscape are explored through Pallasmaa's 'lived space' – integrated with imagination, thoughts, emotions, dreams, the unconscious, memories of the past, and present experiences. According to Juhani Pallasmaa, the structures of music and cinema can be used to express the essence of temporal and spatial experience. Pallasmaa argued for dialectical combinations of external and inner mental space rather than independent boundaries of physics and time.

I first created the imagery of these lilies for Underworld's single Bird 1 – for their 30th Anniversary album album Barking, before remixing it for Lilium.

Lilium was exhibited in the inaugural Big City Lights Festival in July 2022. The immersive ambisonic soundscape was created by John Furguson and Andrew R. Brown.

A documentary about this project was peer reviewed by AMPS 2023 (Architecture Media Politics Society), a conference that foregrounds the intersection of History, Art, Design, Architecture and Film. The documentary won the AMPS YouTube Channel Award 2022 for excellence in scholarship and has been permanently archived on the AMPS Academic YouTube channel, which can be seen here.

TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) is a series of playful acupunctural urban art interventions applying circular economics. In each instance, TWIFSY manifests as a remixed ambiguous image object in public spaces. As a media art installation, it functions like a prototype, prop, puzzle, and model to provoke thought about the near-future world and stimulate thought about how urban life may manifest in the future Smart City mediated by ubiquitous computer networks and artificial intelligence algorithms. This Smart City infrastructure shapes urban life by interlacing and overlaying objects and people with digital networks embedded into everything to sense and communicate real-time data flows that can transform citizens' lives.

Formally, TWIFSY consists of 121,000 hand-assembled components–a mass of recycled e-wasted computers, laser cut acrylic, 3D printed resin figures, steel, glass, LEDs, amplifiers, speakers, ethernet, DMX512-A and Art-net software protocols. TWIFSY's mimetic visual language stems from aesthetics of failure typified by the maker and post-digital hacker movements, where digital detritus becomes raw material for a bricolage of surplus digital and non-digital materials and media, including corrupt image data errors, glitches, and malfunctioning data servers. These materials are iteratively appropriated, repurposed, and remixed into variable arrays of illuminated box panels configured as luminous monoliths. As analogue derivatives of the virtual world-building paradigm, exemplified by Minecraft, TWIFSY aims to provide meaning to the abstract materiality of the digital by drawing attention to the structures that make it possible.

Conceptually, TWIFSY speaks to the speculative cultures of science-fiction, futurism, literature, politics, and film to free the imagination from the pragmatics and preoccupations of day-to-day reality. The work imagines life where the real and virtual worlds have merged into a singularity, a megastructure of planetary-scale computation that manifests as a machine world comprising layers of hardware, software, chemical, biological, and electrical systems where humans co-exist with non-humans. TWIFSY gestures to the history of speculative concept models, exemplified by General Motors Corporation's (GMC) Highways & Horizons exhibit and at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The GMC dioramic installation, also known as Futurama speculated on futural solutions to economic, social, and political problems during the post-depression period, a vision that promised to overcome unemployment and social divisions. However, the ideologies of mass production and overconsumption, which have been adopted and installed by global oligarchies and state institutions worldwide, are now concreted into everyday life–typified by urban blight, suburban sprawl, traffic congestion, and the centralised hermetically sealed shopping malls that host the global brands that have attempted to kill off the Commons.

TWIFSY was selected for ISEA 2024–The 29th International Symposium of Electronic Art–where the associated paper Speculating Smart: An Ambiguous Image Object was presented by the discussion panel Experimental Arts in Public Space. The Brisbane City Council funded the work's installation in the Brisbane CBD, in Queen Street Mall from 20 June to 14 July 2024.

TWIFSY also appeared in The City of Melbourne's Now or Never festival from the 22nd of August to the 19th of October 2024 at the historic T&G Building at 161 Collins Street, where citzens were invited to participate in the Lunchbox Talks with Experimenta.

Code / animated photography / Wired UK

A symbiotic relationship exists between sound and image.

The moving image is created by sampling pixels from still-life photographs of audio output components and then reorganising their spatial coordinates in a virtual three-dimensional workspace. A virtual camera generated new imagery by recording an external second perspective of the source images' matrix of decomposed pixels. A second virtual camera traversed the virtual workspace to record a third lateral perspective of the recomposed source image. 

Electronic sound is generated by sampling the images' colour, tonal, and spatial data values. Those values are used to create a histogram that synthesises the spectrum of an audio signal waveform, which in turn was used to reorientate the x, y, and z coordinates of the extracted pixels to form new frames from each original frame, which were then linearly sequenced.

Communing with robots is a post-digital artwork shown at Curiocity, the outdoor exhibition for The World Science Festival Brisbane 2022. The work questions how an individual’s sense of trust, privacy, and security might be affected in cities increasingly mediated by invasive information communications technologies. Notions of the so-called Smart City background the creative work, which conceives the urban environment transformed into a panoptic schema of surveillance capitalism. If left unchecked, the asymmetries of informational power, exacerbated by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Tech’s commercial agendas, and the Internet of Everything (IoE) – where networked structures connect people, machines, data, objects, and urban infrastructure – will permeate all aspects of everyday public life and transform it into a capital commodity.

Communing with robots was exhibited at Curiocity to provide citizens with a space to reflect and contemplate existence in the hyper-networked city by proposing a slightly subversive creative transformation of a tiny part of the public sphere.

Communing with robots asks: what will human agency mean when centralised artificial intelligence mediates our experience of public and private life? Will anonymity, privacy and trust be possible in a world where AI ‘knows’ you better than you know yourself?

This playful civic hack aimed to provide cathartic relief to the pervasive nature of technologies by undermining the rhetoric surrounding them. Its ontological structures metaphor the network effect through a fusion of satirical self-referential parodies. A standing reserve of surplus data, extracted from the World Wide Web with artificial intelligence, was used to create satirical nonsense prose and poetry, remixed with abstracted depictions of the urban environment conceived as pseudo-surveillance imagery. Paradoxically, while the work aimed to subvert the socio-technical commoditisation of the public sphere, it unintentionally evolved into a pseudo-surveillance-advertising device.

Communing with robots used the OpenAI GPT-2 algorithm to mine data from a neural network and create hybrid textual remixes. This activity was a relatively obscure and emergent practice in 2022. However, by January 2023, within a year of the Communing with robots’ conception, the rapid worldwide communion with ChatGPT-3.5 had reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after its launch – the fastest-growing consumer application in history. This phenomenon indicates the speed at which industrialised AI can reduce global populations' everyday social and mental experiences into a capital commodity.

Communing with robots repeatedly asked GPT-2 the same question: Can I trust you? In each instance, it responded differently. GPT-2 randomly scraped raw behavioural surplus data from eight million web pages and generated conditional ‘synthetic text’.  The diverse responses–from an indeterminate number of unidentifiable sources–gradually coalesced as strangely beautiful non-sensical prose resembling absurdist poetry. This co-creation by human and non-human actors connected in multi-dimensional networks is conceived as a Latourian ‘network tracing activity’ that leverages AI to generate fictional narratives, bizarre characters, and oddly familiar situations. The diverse and often bizarre references to fictional characters and situations are strangely beautiful. With childlike innocence, poetry emerges from GPT-2’s non-human choice of words and the glitchy AI voice overs made using gen-AI test to speech tools. The coloured imagery is pseudo-surveillance imagery created in and around the South Bank Parklands where the installation was placed during the World Science Festival.

With the great folks at Guerrilla, I made this identity collateral for the Bleach* Festival 2016, the annual multi-arts festival of the Gold Coast which aims to connect art with the community through the expression of music, theatre, dance, visual arts and outdoor events.

A wonderful gift to the City of The Gold Coast !

The development process, as with most of my work, was born of intuitive experimentation. The identities, GIFs, and banners used for the Bleach* Festival 2016 idents are derivatives. They were meticulously extracted from the results of a spontaneous studio exercise. Projected imagery of 2D vector graphics and 3D animations were mapped onto the human subject and a sequenced into the video file (bottom). The sound, made by my dear and generous friends from FASE (an art+design collective in Buenos Aires) was used in the video timeline to create the visuals’ responsive temporality, and imbue the imagery with its electro-glitch-rhythm and mood.

Highspeed macro imagery / hydrogen 2 + oxygen 1 / a concept for an interactive data visualisation 

Water is created through the formation of stars and has been in existence for as long as the Universe.  In it’s liquid, gaseous or solid forms it is vital to every life form on Earth. Spiritually and philosophically it is considered a purifier. Physically, for the most part, it is what we are.

A single channel projected video installation, BARI16 Festival, Spring Hill Baths. The projected video installation and performance at the Spring Hill Baths aimed to open a local audience to an immersive experience of h2o from within a pool as an all-encompassing reflected image, augmented by a responsive live musical improvisation by cellist Linda Hwang. The still imagery was exhibited in the group show Plenty at the Brisbane Powerhouse, from the September 27 to the October 23, 2016.

An experiment in form, Halcyon is a visual metaphor for the excessive commodification and dominance of the natural world through socio-technical means which dangerously distorts reality at the expense of its creatures–including humans–and their connection to each other.

Exhibited in London 2011, Brisbane & Philadelphia 2015

Awards Best In Category–Design Series–The Photographers Awards 2011

Feeding Frank is an exploration of the systematic effects of ubiquitous computing and screen surfaces on the daily human experience. Frank (my daughter’s fish) is a metaphor for the choices–or the lack thereof–in how we organise ourselves within these systems.

The video installation shown here was made for Emporium South Bank, ‘Australia's Leading Boutique Hotel’ (2018 World Travel Awards). Shot entirely on my phone, Frank’s ‘world’ was composited for Emporium’s bespoke LED screens including an 18-metre porte-cochère screen and their spectacular mirrored elevator experience.

Check out the video of the kaleidoscopic elevator pitch at the bottom of this page!

Silver gelatine prints, 6 in a series of 24, 142cm wide a variable heights.

To remove the lens is to see without eyes.

Lenses create distorted representations of three dimensional scenes by rendering them onto two dimensional surfaces. The vanishing point provides us with a point of reference, useful for spatial perception and for understanding our relationship with the environment. However, this phenomenon doesn't exist other than as a proxy for how we translate perception into representations of what we believe to be real.

The imagery and sound in this work were generated by AIs prompted to speculate on a technologically determined world driven by Big Tech–a world enveloped by a planetary-scale computation driven by Artificial Intelligence–after the collapse of the biosphere.

Prologue: Post Fourth Industrial Revolution–4IR–According to AI

The sentiments of the sound and lyrics generated by the AIs are youthful and hopeful–if somewhat naïve. The language of the imagery reflects the visual patterns created by humans over thousands of years of art history, conflating the real and the virtual, the human with the non-human, the factual and the fictitious, and it speaks to a utopian-dystopian future.

Episode 01: The Rise and Fall

The generative AI in this montage has a roughness of quality, highlighting the limitations of these early training models. The painterly imagery has many errors, glitches, and faults, including deformed human and animal forms, and the generative voiceover inflects in strange ways. Ironically, as generative AI improves, the charming nuance of these artifacts, by-products, and detritus will gradually disappear. The intrinsically dysfunctional nature of works from this period of AI evolution will be far more challenging to create, and this work will be considered retro in a very short time–if not already.

Background

Today, after more than three decades of digital revolution, we live in the era of surveillance capitalism, the monopolistic extraction of human surplus data from the networks and its aggregation, analysis, and weaponisation as behavioural advertising to modify human thoughts and behaviours. This all-or-nothing contest to manipulate the world for profit is unsustainable. As the middle class erodes and inequality rises, an elite super-class of tech billionaires emerges.

The emergent Fourth Industrial Revolution, colloquially referred to as 4IR or Industry 4.0, fundamentally differs from previous technological revolutions. This fusion of artificial intelligence (AI), smart systems, robotics, machine-to-machine communication, the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, biotechnology, and quantum computing will empower engineers, scientists, and private enterprise to accumulate radically disproportionate degrees of power and wealth, outside of democratic processes and regulatory frameworks. As the biotech and infotech revolutions merge, information will flow from the body and brain to 'smart' machines via biometric sensors, allowing corporations and government agencies to make decisions on citizens’ behalf and modify behaviour in new ways.

According to Yuval Noah Harari (2019), Big Data algorithms will monitor and ‘understand’ human behaviours and feelings much better than humans can. In this case, ‘humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive if they are disconnected from the network’. If so, the illusion of human ‘free will’ will likely disintegrate as authority shifts from humans to computers used by institutions, corporations, and government agencies to understand and manipulate us. Harari speculates that beyond manipulation, once these human and non-human entities have enough data, they will have the power to make choices for us or ‘hack the deeper secrets of life to re-engineer organic life and to create inorganic life forms’. Moreover, this form of ‘technological disruption is not even a leading item on the political agenda’, and engineers and scientists are constructing the emergent ‘twin revolution’ of biotech and infotech that could soon restructure ‘our very bodies and minds’.

Harari, Y. N. (2019). 21 Lessons for the 21st century. London, Vintage.

This thought experiment was an extension of TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself), which was curated by Experimenta in 2024 for Now or Never

This project involves the physical installation of TWIFSY, multi layered soundscapes, and these generative AI narratives to critique technological determinism and its impact on society.

Citizens are invited to participate in a series of Lunchbox talks at the T&G Building at 161 Collins Street from August 27th to 29th, 2024. Questions of identity, autonomy, and human agency at the convergence of reality and virtuality,the promises and pitfalls of the future Smart City, and the onset of Fourth Industrial Revolution will be addressed.

Custom code  / 360 º motion capture / animated photography.

Inspired by the organic beauty of the Phalaenopsis Blossom (orchid) and the design philosophy of Scandinavian collective Muuto. 

Jakob Wagner's Flow Milk Jug and the blossoms are photographed in a 360º range of rotation, creating a three dimensionally mapped image sequence. The data is encoded and re-sampled. In effect, the object can be unwrapped and spread across a two dimensional horizontal plane. Time is spatially compressed from it's multi-dimensional and temporal nature.

muutos : noun - change, modification, new perspective.

In collaboration with Guerrilla, I creatively directed, produced, photographed and post-produced these identity portraits for the Bleach* Festival 2018 Program and media collateral. See the backstory here.

UHD Digital OOH / in-store installations / online / print / digital facades / client UNIQLO.

D&AD 2014  Award  / In-Book Branding, Brand Experience & Environments

A challenging multi-platform project, with the team spread across the globe in London, Paris, New York, Barcelona and Tokyo. My delivery involved creating the visuals and a design management solution to the complex workflow, from pre-production and production, through to post-production.

The LED installations went up in the flagship store on 5th Avenue, and the SoHo, West 34th St, Paris and London stores.

In NYC at the time, I popped by to document the installation process.

In collaboration with Guerrilla, and some fabulously talented performing artists I creatively directed, produced, photographed and post-produced this identity collateral for the Bleach* Festival 2017.

Australian Marketing Institute – Awards for Marketing Excellence / Not for Profit Marketing Award. See the backstory here .

Eyecanfly is the research and prototype for an immersive virtual flight experience using stereoscopic 3D photography, micro drones and virtual reality. I presented the work at EVA 2013 (the Electronic Visual Arts conference) at The British Computer Society.

A BIG thanks to Captain 3D and all of those who bravely took part in the user-testing sessions.

Greenpeace / Arctic Global Day of Action / outdoor projection mapping / commissioned by Greenpeace UK  / curated and edited by Immersive.

A global movement to stop the largest companies in the world from destroying the Arctic for profit.

I created a short piece, briefed with the keyword of 'hope' to map to the facade of Friends House, the office of Quakers in Britain. Other contributing animators were Jordan Foster, Chris Stoneman, Matt King, Tom Wall, Bruno Costarelli, Sipos Mihály, Daero Ra, Clive Shaw, Daniel Wiedemann, Alexander Andrew Boyce, Sunghwoa Gong.

2014 News flash, from Nic and all the Arctic defenders at Greenpeace UK...

"Prepare yourself for some BIG news".

"Shell’s new boss, Ben van Beurden, has scrapped Shell’s 2014 Arctic drilling plans".

"This is a major result for everyone who has fought for the Arctic and presents a huge opportunity to protect the Arctic for good".

"Right now, Van Beurden is deciding Shell’s strategy for the future, and he’s under a lot of pressure to make some big changes".

"Just two weeks ago, in the face of falling profits, Shell had to release its first profit warning in ten years. And thanks to a broad range of environmental groups, a US court ruled that Shell couldn’t drill in Alaska this year".

"Investors are really nervous, and vast amounts of money have been wasted on fines, leases and equipment. Shell’s $5 billion Arctic experiment has been a failure".

Send an urgent message to Shell’s new CEO telling him to rethink these reckless Arctic plans.

"Ten years ago, when Shell first decided to gamble on oil in the melting Arctic Ocean it might have looked like a good investment. Fast forward to 2014 and Shell have nothing to show except financial loss and reputational disaster. The world has changed and big oil is not the future".

"It’s time to move on. Let’s make it happen".

In the face of nature's overwhelming dominance, living can be a process of ritualistically basic activity.

At great altitudes and in some of the most isolated regions of the Argentine and Chilean Andes - often only accessible by air, horse or all terrain vehicles - people tell stories of great tribulation. Their meagre possessions are those of need, utilitarian and transportable. The extremes in temperatures, blisteringly cold winds and the continuous lightning storms that blast at the earth's surface have shaped their lives. One might wonder at how and why these locations were chosen for founding their communities.

Large format analogue photography / C-type and silver gelatine prints / 6 in a series of 35.

Adidas Germany  / Content for Interactive wall installation for flagship retail store in Berlin. 

This collaborative piece draws upon the life and work of  Edweard Muybridge's human motion studies and stop frame animations.

Each frame is of UHD resolution suitable for multi-platform usage from large format print and digital OOH to online and mobile.

TVC / chromatography & timelapse photography / client BBC  / commissioned by Red Bee Media & Tomato.

Paper chromatography is the process used to animate the typography. Black ink dissolves in water which carries it through the paper via capillary action. Distinguishable by their variety of colour, the separate compounds within the ink separate and travel through the cellulose base at differing rates.

I captured these portraits of audience members during the live performance of Calling Home, a celebration that brought together people of all ages, faiths and traditions at HOTA (Home of the Arts) on the Gold Coast.

The portraits accompanied Yirmal’s touching finale performance of Spirit of Place. Yirrmal is a Yolngu man from the community of Yirrkala in North-East Arnhem Land. He is related to Geoffery Gurrumul Yunupingu on his mother’s side and his father, Witiyana Marika, was a singer and dancer in Yothu Yindi.

Director - Benjamin Knapton

Musical direction: Gordon Hamilton

Musical arrangements: William Barton, Camerata (Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra) and The Australian Voices

Commissioned by: Natalie Lidgerwood, Senior Programmer, HOTA

Published: See the hyperimagery on Facebook

Void is a projected image installation and a visual model that was created to study the relationships between the photographic image and computational thinking. This line of thought, used to decompose problems by identifying variables to form generalisations or abstractions, is based on the fatalistic assumption that the more information that we have about the world the more control we may have over it.

The work was included in the exhibition Strategies for the Future at the C3 Contemporary Art Space at the Abbotsford Convent Foundation. 

Sunpath data visualisation: Andrew Marsh

Spoken word: Fiona Jeanne Grisard

In collaboration with Bleached Arts and Guerrilla and Legs on the Wall, I creatively directed this piece for the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Corporation’s (GOLDOC) One Year to Go Community Celebration on the The Gold Coast. 

Conceived of on a napkin, over a breakfast meeting on the beach at Burleigh, we had a lead and delivery time of only 2 weeks. In true 8-bit style, the directors cut includes sharks, alligators and alien invaders.

GOLDOC describes the work as “a gravity defying light projection show that will light up the night with a taste of the sports on offer at GC2018”.

Concept & Creative Direction: Peter Thiedeke

Animation and design: Todd Clausen @ Guerrilla Digital  

Projection: www.ikonix.net.au

Client: Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Corporation GOLDOC

Big Trombone was an urban media art installation at the Big City Lights Festival, 2024. This experimental multi-channel projected image and spatial soundscape was a hybrid form of urban acupuncture, a civic hack in public space that aimed to supplant the humdrum of everyday urban existence. Big Trombone’s immense disfigured imagery and reverberating rhythms emanated from Regent Lane, spilling into Southport, a Central Business District of The City of Gold Coast, to create new energy and demonstrate the possibilities of what might otherwise be missing.

The work seen in the video (bottom) was designed as three panels distributed across a 30-metres wide building facade. This spatial treatment of projected imagery, an the four channel spatial soundscape, conform with sculptural understandings of space. Unlike imagery on small screens and devices that can be ‘looked at’, the work cannot be experienced the same way twice. This approach uses the phenomenology associated with architectural form, and embodied experience in open air environments. It can only be understood through its spatial experience in three dimensions at full scale. It requires bodily immersion, motion and actual presence in its physical space, at scale, and in its intended reception site.

Argentina is a land of seemingly infinite wealth and possibilities, the land of milk and honey. As rich as an Argentine was a common turn of phrase used throughout the early 20th century. During the 1940s food commodity exports totaled more than any other nation in the world, including the United states.

These abandoned salons have transcended the decades since 1914. Evita Peron, Argentina's icon to the poor and working classes, would spend small fortunes here indulging herself, preening on the marble stair cases and dancing upon the mahogany parquetry floors. Now, much like herself, the intricate detailing lies buried beneath the stories and the dust.

35mm analogue photography / giclee prints / 6 in a series of 16.